Apr
4
2025

Red Queen

(paid link)

Fun Fact: the publisher, Minotaur Books, misspelled blurber Alafair Burke's first name on the front cover of Portsmouth (NH) Public Library's copy of this book as "Alfair". Pretty noticeable error for someone who reads a lot of her dad's Dave Robicheaux novels. It seems to have been fixed in later printings.

I came to read this thanks to a glowing review of White King by the same author, Juan Gómez-Jurado. Which (it turns out) is the third entry in a trilogy. Better start with the first one, I said.

It is a translation from the original Spanish. Apparently there's a certain amount of humor in the author's prose, and at least some of that survives in the English version; I smiled in a number of spots. And it's a definite page-turner.

The overall premise of the trilogy is that the extraordinarily intelligent Antonia Scott has been recruited by a shadowy organization to solve crimes that have the normal Spanish police force stumped. She has serious psychological problems, and a family life marked by violence and dysfunction. She is teamed up with Jon Gutiiérrez, a gay police detective "who doesn't play by the rules". Specifically, he's about to face criminal charges for planting phony evidence in an unsuccessful attempt to bring down a drug dealer.

Their first case together involves the body of a young boy, drained of blood, head anointed with oil, straight out of Psalm 23. That's followed closely by the kidnapping of a wealthy heiress. Antonia and Jon are resented by the normal police, Jon's targeted by an egotistic journalist, and the heiress's father is obviously hiding something important. And the perp seems to have outsmarted/outviollenced them at every turn. Has a faster car, too.

My only gripe: seems more than a bit contrived. I can suspend disbelief as well as the next person, but at a certain point… Example: Without spoiling anything, the big "shocking plot twist" is the revelation of a ruse that (as near as I can tell) makes no particular sense to the story; it seems planted to just boggle the mind of readers.

I Promise Not to Mention Tariffs

(at least not right away)

The April 2 "Liberation Day" announcement caused a lot of commentary yesterday. But it wasn't the only piece of bad economic news. According to Cato's Romina Boccia and Dominik Lettm The Senate’s Latest Budget Resolution is a Fiscal Train Wreck.

There's a pic of a literal train wreck at the top of their article, but this one is pretty close to literal:

On April 2, the Senate unveiled a new budget blueprint, a crucial step in using reconciliation to enact President Donald Trump’s agenda. This budget isn’t just a missed opportunity; it actively worsens our nation’s debt trajectory. The resolution abandons the House’s concrete spending reductions desperately needed in today’s high-debt environment, sets a dangerous precedent by adopting a so-called current policy baseline that hides the very real deficit impact of extending tax cuts, and adds hundreds of billions in new deficit spending. The Senate should go back to the drawing board.

Under the amended budget framework, the Senate allows for $1.5 trillion in new tax cuts plus $500 billion in new spending, primarily for immigration and defense. That’s on top of the $3.8 trillion in tax cuts that will be magically waived away by using a current policy baseline—roughly the equivalent of pretending it doesn’t cost anything to extend a streaming subscription because you’ve been paying for it for a few months already. The graph below shows the change to the deficit over ten years under the amended resolution.

As I type, the Google saith that gold futures are up 36.34% over the past year. My investment portfolio… is not.

Also of note:

  • How does Social Security differ from a Ponzi Scheme? David "@iowahawkblog" Burge and Mary Katherine ("@mkhammer") Ham explore the similarities and one big difference, in an effort to educate Janice (@leftcoastbabe") Hough:

    That's right: Charles Ponzi went to prison; that hasn't happened to any of the Social Security hucksters.

  • Note to self: don't try to tell authors what their books are about. J.K. Rowling takes a critic to school:

    You need some background? A recent article: J.K. Rowling will not be arrested for comments about transgender women, police say.

    However, if you are some random Scot, you may not be so fortunate, so watch your mouths, lads and lassies.

  • OK, as promised/threatened: Gee, there's a lot of commentary about the tariffs, isn't there? A sampling follows, first up is Jim Geraghty: Trump’s Totally Arbitrary Tariff Regime.

    There are two main takeaways from [Wednesday]’s “liberation day” announcements. The new tariffs are economically illiterate, self-destructive, top-to-bottom nonsense, imposed with no sense of rhyme or reason, assembled by White House staffers who do not know which territories have serious trade relationships with the U.S. and which ones are inhabited entirely by penguins. Also, the White House continues to avoid almost any decision that could possibly antagonize Vladimir Putin, while inflicting as much pain as possible on longtime allies and vulnerable friends like Israel and Taiwan.

    For America’s enemies, Wednesday was the best day in a long time.

    That's mild compared to Kevin D. Williamson's take: Donald Trump's Malevolent Laziness.

    What a bunch of buffoons.

    If men could actually die of shame, then Donald Trump’s economic team would be toast—instead, it is only their reputations that have been buried.

    As I have been writing for some time, Donald Trump’s most fundamental character flaw—his laziness—has been his country’s saving grace, at least at times. Trump is an aspiring caudillo whose political models are Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and a would-be tyrant who attempted to stage a coup d’état after losing the 2020 election to a barely sentient Joe Biden—but, as bad as he was and is, he could have been and could be a great deal worse if not for the fact that he is unbelievably lazy, a Fox News-watching, social-media-addicted couch potato of a chief executive who might have wielded the levers of power to greater malevolent effect if he had bothered to work at his craft a little bit.

    And Jeff Maurer is having a coulda/woulda/shoulda moment: We Should Have Taken Trump Literally, Not Seriously. He provides a sampling of appalled economist tweets. My favorite:

    But overall:

    The proximate cause of the entire economics profession wondering “should we just Jonestown ourselves?” isn’t just Trump’s idiotic tariffs; it’s the stupidity with which his idiotic tariffs have been implemented dumbly. Because the less-completely-retarded rationale for tariffs is that they’re a tit-for-tat measure that punishes countries who put up trade barriers; in theory, a brief trade war could push countries to lower barriers and level the playing field. But Trump didn’t slap higher tariffs on countries that have higher barriers; he slapped tariffs on countries that happen to have a trade surplus with the US, no matter what their policies are. Notoriously closed-off economies like Iran and Saudi Arabia got off relatively easy (10 percent tariffs on each), while trading partners who have been playing by the rules like the European Union and Japan got hit hard (20 and 24 percent tariffs, respectively). Also: We put tariffs on a remote island chain in the Indian Ocean inhabited only by penguins. It is now the official policy of the United States that we will restore trade balance by keeping rockhopper penguins from poaching our manufacturing jobs.

    And it gets even dumber…

    Click over to see just how dumb it gets.